User blog:Odusthegreat/Pocket Planes Strategy Part I: Starting the game
There are a lot of places to choose to start. However, there are some pros and cons on each location. I am going to explain these to you. First, let's learn the starting locations and its airport: *South America: Recife, Fortaleza, Teresina *Europe: Berlin, Munich, Brussels *Oceania: Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide *Asia: Osaka, Sendai, Sapporo *Eastern America: Detroit, Ottawa, Montreal *Western America: Pheonix, San Diego, Las Vegas *Central America: Guatemala, Havana, San Jose *Africa: Nairobi, Zanzibar, Harare Now, I am going to analyse the locations one by one. For South America, To me, it is okay to start here. You have more access to Class 1 airports. However, there are quite a lot of disadvantages: The larger airports (Class 2 and 3) are not placed well. They are located on the side of South America. That means it will not be a good location once you have access to larger planes (Class 2 and 3). Also, these large airports are usually in pairs, like Bogota-Caracas, Recife-Salvador and Rio De Janeiro-Sao Paulo. This is not good as this means there are less useful large airports. Finally, there are too much Class 1 airports, which are mostly useless. The continent is small too, making South America not a good place to start. For Europe, this is probably the Second best starting location. The airport distribution is quite balanced in terms of both geographically and classes. It is easy to start and easy to expand as it is close to both Asia and Africa, 2 of the largest continents. However, there are not much large airports, and the distribution of Eastern Europe is not good enough. More class 1 airports are needed to be built to connect one large airport to another for planes with less range. For Oceania, it is one of the few locations that does not have much large airports, similar to Africa. The airports are distributed quite good in terms to geography. You can expand quickly with a large abundence of Class 1 airports. One major problem, however, is that there are no class 3 airports in Australia and New Zealand. This makes Oceania quite useless when growing to a large airline relying on mostly Class 2 and 3 planes. For Asia, it is surrounded with large airports, which will be convenient for future development. However, it is extremely hard to expand as for the lack of Class 1 airports. Do not start here if you are a beginner to this game as profitting is quite hard when you just start the game. For Eastern America, I would say that this is the best location to start. The balanced distribution of airports in terms of class and geography makes it perfect to start. You can expand easily, either by using the class 1 airports, or buying large airports for future development. It is also close to South America, therefore easy to expand south. One problem is that it is being isolated from the rest of the world. You will most likely need to use the North route to go to Europe, or buying larger planes that can cross the Atlantic Ocean. For Western America, it is quite similar to Eastern America. However, it has one more disadvantage comparing to Eastern America: it has less large airports around. You will need more time to expand to Eastern America. For Central America, it will be good to connect to both North and South America. However, once again, it has less large airports surrounding it. Also, it is less profitable as it is small and profits less if you expand to Europe, Africa or Asia as planes need to cross the Atlantic Ocean either by the North route, the South route or the 'central' route - from London/Paris/Madrid to New York/Boston. As route from Europe/Asia/Africa need to have a larger turning angle to Central America, it will be less profiable to have routes like this. However, this is not a huge concern as most players will expand to North and South anyways and it does not have much airports, which makes such routes less likely to happen. For Africa, it is quite similar to Oceania except it has more large airports than Oceania. It is easy to expand, but at the same time, the location of large airports are quite bad. It has almost no large airport in Northwest Africa and the locations of these large airports are quite far away. In addition, there are almost no airports avaliable in the Sahara Desert, making the player a harder time to connect between North-West Africa and South Africa (location, not the country). Though players can establish an eastern route to connect them, the western route is actually quite important as planes from Europe would always use the western route to cross to South America. Do think carefully about how to solve this geophrical problem. I hope my analysis can help you determine your starting location. You can also comment down below if you have any questions or opinions. In the next blog, I am going to give you advice on how to expand your airline. I will first talk about choosing airports in the next blog, then talk about plane choosing in the blog after the next blog. Category:Blog posts